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<strong>IMPORTANT</strong>: No additional bug fixes or documentation updates
will be released for this version. For the latest information, see the
<a href="../current/index.html">current release documentation</a>.
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<span class="breadcrumb-node">Arrays</span>
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<div class="section">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div>
<h2 class="title">
<a id="array"></a>Arrays<a class="edit_me edit_me_private" rel="nofollow" title="Editing on GitHub is available to Elastic" href="https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/edit/7.7/docs/reference/mapping/types/array.asciidoc">edit</a>
</h2>
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<p>In Elasticsearch, there is no dedicated <code class="literal">array</code> datatype.  Any field can contain
zero or more values by default, however, all values in the array must be of the
same datatype. For instance:</p>
<div class="ulist itemizedlist">
<ul class="itemizedlist">
<li class="listitem">
an array of strings: [ <code class="literal">"one"</code>, <code class="literal">"two"</code> ]
</li>
<li class="listitem">
an array of integers: [ <code class="literal">1</code>, <code class="literal">2</code> ]
</li>
<li class="listitem">
an array of arrays: [ <code class="literal">1</code>, [ <code class="literal">2</code>, <code class="literal">3</code> ]] which is the equivalent of [ <code class="literal">1</code>, <code class="literal">2</code>, <code class="literal">3</code> ]
</li>
<li class="listitem">
an array of objects: [ <code class="literal">{ "name": "Mary", "age": 12 }</code>, <code class="literal">{ "name": "John", "age": 10 }</code>]
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="note admon">
<div class="icon"></div>
<div class="admon_content">
<h3>Arrays of objects</h3>
<p>Arrays of objects do not work as you would expect: you cannot query each
object independently of the other objects in the array.  If you need to be
able to do this then you should use the <a class="xref" href="nested.html" title="Nested datatype"><code class="literal">nested</code></a> datatype instead
of the <a class="xref" href="object.html" title="Object datatype"><code class="literal">object</code></a> datatype.</p>
<p>This is explained in more detail in <a class="xref" href="nested.html" title="Nested datatype">Nested</a>.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>When adding a field dynamically, the first value in the array determines the
field <code class="literal">type</code>.  All subsequent values must be of the same datatype or it must
at least be possible to <a class="xref" href="coerce.html" title="coerce">coerce</a> subsequent values to the same
datatype.</p>
<p>Arrays with a mixture of datatypes are <em>not</em> supported: [ <code class="literal">10</code>, <code class="literal">"some string"</code> ]</p>
<p>An array may contain <code class="literal">null</code> values, which are either replaced by the
configured <a class="xref" href="null-value.html" title="null_value"><code class="literal">null_value</code></a> or skipped entirely.  An empty array
<code class="literal">[]</code> is treated as a missing field — a field with no values.</p>
<p>Nothing needs to be pre-configured in order to use arrays in documents, they
are supported out of the box:</p>
<div class="pre_wrapper lang-console">
<pre class="programlisting prettyprint lang-console">PUT my_index/_doc/1
{
  "message": "some arrays in this document...",
  "tags":  [ "elasticsearch", "wow" ], <a id="CO289-1"></a><i class="conum" data-value="1"></i>
  "lists": [ <a id="CO289-2"></a><i class="conum" data-value="2"></i>
    {
      "name": "prog_list",
      "description": "programming list"
    },
    {
      "name": "cool_list",
      "description": "cool stuff list"
    }
  ]
}

PUT my_index/_doc/2 <a id="CO289-3"></a><i class="conum" data-value="3"></i>
{
  "message": "no arrays in this document...",
  "tags":  "elasticsearch",
  "lists": {
    "name": "prog_list",
    "description": "programming list"
  }
}

GET my_index/_search
{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "tags": "elasticsearch" <a id="CO289-4"></a><i class="conum" data-value="4"></i>
    }
  }
}</pre>
</div>
<div class="console_widget" data-snippet="snippets/619.console"></div>
<div class="calloutlist">
<table border="0" summary="Callout list">
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top" width="5%">
<p><a href="#CO289-1"><i class="conum" data-value="1"></i></a></p>
</td>
<td align="left" valign="top">
<p>The <code class="literal">tags</code> field is dynamically added as a <code class="literal">string</code> field.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top" width="5%">
<p><a href="#CO289-2"><i class="conum" data-value="2"></i></a></p>
</td>
<td align="left" valign="top">
<p>The <code class="literal">lists</code> field is dynamically added as an <code class="literal">object</code> field.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top" width="5%">
<p><a href="#CO289-3"><i class="conum" data-value="3"></i></a></p>
</td>
<td align="left" valign="top">
<p>The second document contains no arrays, but can be indexed into the same fields.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top" width="5%">
<p><a href="#CO289-4"><i class="conum" data-value="4"></i></a></p>
</td>
<td align="left" valign="top">
<p>The query looks for <code class="literal">elasticsearch</code> in the <code class="literal">tags</code> field, and matches both documents.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<div class="sidebar">
<a id="multi-value-fields-inverted-index"></a>
<div class="titlepage"><div><div>
<p class="title"><strong>Multi-value fields and the inverted index</strong></p>
</div></div></div>
<p>The fact that all field types support multi-value fields out of the box is a
consequence of the origins of Lucene.  Lucene was designed to be a full text
search engine.  In order to be able to search for individual words within a
big block of text, Lucene tokenizes the text into individual terms, and
adds each term to the inverted index separately.</p>
<p>This means that even a simple text field must be able to support multiple
values by default.  When other datatypes were added, such as numbers and
dates, they used the same data structure as strings, and so got multi-values
for free.</p>
</div>
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